Improper Stress Management Can Harm Your Health
When you feel stress, can you feel it rising up slowly within you? Can you identify the events that are causing you to feel pressure? Is it the monthly bills that are piling up when you know you don’t have the money to pay for them? Is it your sick child that you’re afraid to take to the hospital or doctor because you don’t have health insurance? Being able to identify your stress triggers is the first step towards learning how to control your stress.
Stress is important to control because if impacts your health, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. How does stress affect health? There are many studies showing a direct link between high blood pressure and stress. It’s true that the high blood pressure caused by stress is normally temporary and dissipates as the stress disappears. But, constant and persistent body stress, even if it’s low level, eventually begins to take it’s toll on the human body. Isolated periods of high blood pressure will probably not harm you, but if your blood pressure is elevated over an extended period of time, eventually the excess pressure will begin to directly impact body organs such as the kidney, heart, and other parts of your cardiovascular system.
This is not to say that all stress is bad, because it is not. Much stress is useful and even good because it helps us to progress in life and to attain our goals. It’s only when stress begins to impact negatively on your body functions that you should be concerned. Stress is either your master or your slave. If you want to take control over your stress, you first have to believe that have the strength to be it’s master.